The Flight of Birds Read online

  The Flight of Birds

  ANIMAL PUBLICS

  Melissa Boyde & Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Series Editors

  * * *

  The Animal Publics series publishes new interdisciplinary research in animal studies. Taking inspiration from the varied and changing ways that humans and non-human animals interact, it investigates how animal life becomes public: attended to, listened to, made visible, included and transformed.

  Animal Death

  Ed. Jay Johnston & Fiona Probyn-Rapsey

  Animal Welfare in Australia: Politics and Policy

  Peter John Chen

  Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-Human Futures

  Ed. The Human Animal Research Network Editorial Collective

  Cane Toads: A Tale of Sugar, Politics and Flawed Science

  Nigel Turvey

  Engaging with Animals: Interpretations of a Shared Existence

  Ed. Georgette Leah Burns & Mandy Paterson

  Fighting Nature: Travelling Menageries, Animal Acts and War Shows

  Peta Tait

  The Flight of Birds: A Novel in Twelve Stories

  Joshua Lobb

  A Life for Animals

  Christine Townend

  Obaysch: A Hippopotamus in Victorian London

  John Simons

  The Flight of Birds

  A Novel in Twelve Stories

  Joshua Lobb

  For Jenny Gales

  Contents

  What He Heard

  Six Stories About Birds, with Seven Questions

  Call and Response

  Flocking

  Do You Speak My Language?

  Further to Fly

  The Pecking Order

  Nocturne

  Magpies

  And No Birds Sing

  Aves Admittant

  The Flight of Birds

  Field Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Works Cited

  About the author

  Copyright

  What He Heard

  Maybe I heard a poem, seeping from its cracks. So I stood and listened, just for a minute, like a hungry robin listening for worms.

  Or two minutes, or three.

  David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

  He was walking with his dog in the bush. It was the middle of nowhere. They were following a sort of track along a ridge: made by wombats, probably, or by the man and the dog the last time they’d walked this way. The rise of the ridge was clear of trees. A bony bit of scrub; a quartzy boulder unearthing itself from the hill. He stopped and took in the view. In the fuzzy winter light, the hills across the gorge blended into the charcoal sky. The air shivered. He trudged on.

  The dog was tracing a line of scent with his nose. The thread would wriggle off the track for a moment, then veer back, tighten around an ossified rock, or thicken at a clump of grass. The scent was leading the dog—well, the man and the dog—to the eucalypts at the top of the hill. The dog reached the threshold of the trees, looked back insistently, and disappeared into the bush. The man followed.

  He was staying in a friend’s cabin; he’d been there a month. It was after what people called ‘his breakdown’, or what those closer to him called ‘one of his breakdowns’. He just thought of it as ‘normality’. It was a feeling he always had, hovering, just out of reach. Every few years it would swoop down, grab him by the shoulders and carry him away.

  Broken leaves crunched underfoot. He was careful to sidestep the knuckles of eucalypt roots. He could hear the dog, sniffing, in the semi-darkness. He wasn’t sure if the dog was still following the wombat track, or the line of scent, or charting his own way between the thin trees. Their bark was smooth, mostly: lavender-grey with purpling bruises. Every now and then his hand would brush against the rougher, splintery skin of a turpentine. The treetops creaked in the rasping breeze.

  Then he heard it. An oozing, matted sound. Plods of noise like snoring; like sobbing. The sound was too incoherent to be nearby and yet it felt close, like a heartbeat, thumping. The dog lifted his nose, as if the scent had become airborne. Man and dog stood in the gloom: listening, sniffing. The sobs coagulated the air. Then the sound changed: from sobbing to wailing. One long wail. Shrill and jangling, it slapped against the man’s skin. His instinct was to flee, to scamper over the dirt and to leap out into the light of the open hill. It was only the dog’s growl and poised upraised paw that made him stay. He listened to the shriek more carefully. He knew now what it was. The wail was coming from a child.

  He stumbled forward, following the call. It was difficult to work out its trajectory. Even the dog seemed uncertain, darting first over a termite mound, then scrabbling under a thorny bush. The man clambered after, ripping his hand on ironbark. The howl persisted. It was always too far away, just beyond the next clutch of trees. It was definitely a child’s voice. A boy? A girl, maybe? Was the child lost? Had he tripped in the darkness and broken a bone? Where had the child come from? There were no houses nearby. The nearest neighbours were on the ridge across the gorge. The only other building was the old schoolhouse, a goldrush structure, just over the ridge. But that had been abandoned years ago and it was now just a half-collapsed shell of pockmarked stone. The wail intensified: a long siren of agony. The man tumbled over a protruding rock; the thump of his knee in the dirt scattered the dry leaves. He lay on the earth, trying to catch his breath. The dog trotted back and licked his dusty face. He listened to the bawling cry in the distance. Yes, it was definitely coming from the schoolhouse.

  He made his way through the talon-scratched trees, listening to the lament of the child. It was difficult to know what he was calling for. Sometimes it sounded like the child was pleading, begging for something, or for something to stop. Sometimes it was the sound of deep sadness, the clamour of loneliness, the ache of fear. The wail was as abandoned as the land around him, as beaten as the fallen stones.

  And there it was. The ruined schoolhouse. On the edge of the copse of trees, looking out over the ridge into the expansive gorge. The wail was definitely coming from inside: sharp and urgent, yearning and terrified. He was compelled to step through the hungry space where a door used to be. But the dog hung back, trembling.

  Inside, it was cramped, shadowy. Most of the rusty corrugated roof was still there, but there was a large gap above the doorway through which he could see the blackening sky. The floorboards had either rotted away or been carted off for firewood. The ground was gravelly.

  Behind him, in the doorway, the dog gave a few furtive sniffs but did not come in.

  The man peered into the dark. There was nothing there. Even the wail had stopped.

  Then, just as he was about to turn, the sound began again, sharp and stinging. It was coming from one of the dingy corners of the abandoned schoolhouse. The man froze, unable to move towards it. He wanted to call out to it, but his throat had seized and his saliva had curdled.

  Then he saw something stepping out of the darkness.

  It was beautiful. The arc of downy back was cinnamon and silver, with a streak of charcoal following the line of the wing. It was a lyrebird. The tail was down, coiled under a round torso, but as the bird poked forward, the feathers fanned upwards, forming a halo of grey and stripy brown. The lyrebird’s beak opened, and the wailing noise streamed out. The bird paused, a lidless eye staring at the intruder. He, the man, did not look away. The lyrebird’s beak opened again and the peep of a whipbird syruped the air. The man knew that lyrebirds could mimic almost anything—from kookaburras to cameras and chainsaws—but he’d never heard the sounds with his own ears, never been so close to a lyrebird to be able to see the beak open and close, each time producing a different sound. The bird seemed eager to perform, producing
the sound of another whipbird, then the child-like wail, then the murmur of a currawong. After that, the lyrebird returned to the murky, sobbing sound he’d first heard through the trees. Three short sobs. Then another three. Then the wail again. The sound now seemed melodious: a warm line of music resonating in the stone room.

  The man watched and listened for a few minutes, mesmerised by the tiny beak opening and shutting, the quiver of the bird’s throat. Then he tiptoed out of the ruined building followed by the dog, tail down. The man offered his hand to the dog. The dog licked his palm and wagged a furtive tail.

  They found their way through the bush. They could still hear the wail in the distance, fading away. It was almost comforting. They stepped out of the bushland on his side of the ridge. A few stars were surfacing from the blue-black sky. He took in the night, still thinking of the beauty of the bird and the melody of the wail.

  Then he realised. Lyrebirds are mimickers. They hear the shriek of a chainsaw in the bush, or the buzz of a tourist’s camera, and repeat it. But there has to be a logger or a tourist. The noise must be made by someone: a figure calling in the bush. As he made his way down the ridge, he pondered on this. There must have been a child in pain, once. Someone, at some time, had made that coagulating wail. But when? And how long ago?

  There’s an epilogue to this story, one that has nothing to do with the man or the dog. The lyrebird is scratching the dirt in the gravelly corner. He lifts his head. His larynx vibrates. Out of his beak come three short notes. The second is microtonally higher than the first and third. This is followed by a long high trill. The noise he is making is not full of sadness or pain. The lyrebird is not thinking about lost or abandoned children. His head pivots. The dwindling light points out a speck in the dirt. The lyrebird pecks and then he sings his song again.

  Six Stories About Birds, with Seven Questions

  The first [question] is, is it important for us, for our own well-being or the realization of our human potential, that we live in intimate commensal relations with animals? The second is, is it important for the environment that we live in such relations? Does the world need us to continue to live in our ancestral communalism with animals?

  Freya Mathews, ‘Living with Animals’

  Between the kitchen and the laundry is a small alcove with a door leading to the back garden. We call it the vestibule. We use it to store bits and pieces—muddy shoes, the broom, a stumpy torch that doesn’t work, a bread-maker we tried once which is now quietly rusting. A low bookcase in the vestibule holds recipe books people have given us for Christmas, dog biscuits and other animal paraphernalia. On top of the bookcase there is a cage, and in the cage—among the water trough, the swing, the bell and a hunk of millet—lives (or, more accurately, lived) Charlotte.

  Charlotte is a budgie. I didn’t choose the name. I think I wanted to draw attention to the black and yellow stripes on the side of her face—call her ‘Tiger’ or ‘Zebra’ or something like that—but my daughter vetoed these. ‘She’s a bird, Daddy,’ she said, and Charlotte ruffled her tail feathers as if to demonstrate this fact. My wife was more focused on the bird’s out-of-proportion rib cage, lime-green and fluffy, which made her look, my wife said, like a plump schoolgirl in an Enid Blyton novel. ‘What about “Bunty”,’ she suggested. ‘Bunty the Budgie.’ But my daughter persisted with Charlotte.

  And, after all, she is my daughter’s bird. My daughter hangs around in the vestibule, mesmerised by Charlotte’s hops and the way she twitches her head; she laughs when Charlotte picks at the chunky millet or scratches the sandpaper floor. Charlotte skips over to the tinkly bell and nudges it: my daughter believes she has trained the bird to do this on cue, though I think the timing of the head-bangs is completely random. My daughter is teaching Charlotte to talk. Most of the time the bird just squeaks, clucking and beeping like an automatic teller machine, but the squeaks are sometimes punctuated with the words ‘Charlotte’, ‘hello’, ‘beautiful’ and, inexplicably, ‘breakfast’. My daughter chirps along with Charlotte, shifting her voice up several tones so she sounds like a demented Disney character. ‘Beautiful, breakfast, beautiful.’ Charlotte’s round eyes stare back at my enraptured daughter.

  I’m less devoted to the bird. If we forget to slip the cover over her cage, she can bleep on all night. We sometimes neglect to change her water, which then reeks. When I do remember to change it—my fingers peeking in through the cage door—I’m mindful of Charlotte’s pointed claws and enthusiastic beak. Charlotte flaps up to the high beam of the cage, squeezing her feathers close to her ribs.

  One Sunday morning, Charlotte and my fingers are keeping their distance from each other. It’s a sprightly day. A triangle of sunlight is shafting though the open door. The cheerful sounds of lawnmowers and whipper snippers warble in from the garden. My fingers draw out the water trough and retreat through the cage door. I scrabble through the junk on the bookshelf below, searching for a rectangle of sandpaper to re-line the cage floor. The dog ambles in, hoping for a secret biscuit. He sniffs the crook of my arm. I scratch his head. I almost don’t hear a rattle and feel only a whiff of movement as something skims the top of my hair. I look up in time to see the yellow tail feathers flying through the open vestibule door. A chance moment. And Charlotte is gone.

  That night, and for the weeks that follow, my daughter asks questions about what happened to Charlotte. I try to answer them the best way I can. I tell her stories. I tell stories to myself.

  The First Story: Cinderella

  After the wailing is over—after the frantic searches in the garden and the neighbour’s garden and in the park down the street, after the flurry of accusations and flailing rage at my carelessness and the penances promised forevermore, after the sulky refusals to eat and the careful, staged dinner conversation between my wife and me about animals’ adaptability and resilience, after the discussion about all the trees in the surrounding suburb that Charlotte could nest in, after the sobbing has lulled into sniffs and moony sighs, after the hugs and the piggy-back ride to bed—after all of that, I read my daughter the story of Cinderella. Not the best choice. I’d forgotten about the turtledoves and pigeons: Cinderella’s faithful companions. They whirr in through the kitchen window to pluck the lentils out of the ashes. Later, they perch on the branch Cinderella has planted for her dead mother. At the end of the story, the birds peck out the stepsisters’ eyes.

  There are a lot of birds in my daughter’s fairy tale book. I’ve read the stories to her many times. We have little rituals of narration: synchronised gestures and sound effects. In one story, bluebirds keep a princess company when the evil queen locks her in the tower. (‘Clang!’ my daughter cries as the metal bars swing shut.) In another, a girl’s brother is taken by a witch, and a gaggle of flying geese guide the girl through the marsh. (My daughter’s hands, clasped together, swoop past the lampshade and the birds soar across the bedroom walls.) Like Cinderella’s turtledoves, my daughter sings out when Prince Charming nearly marries the wrong sister. When an orphan shows kindness to a sparrow, breaking off crumbs from his last hunk of stale bread, my daughter’s hand becomes the bird’s beak, jabbing at the eiderdown. In that story, the grateful bird gives the boy the gift of all the animal languages of the world. The only language the sparrow can’t teach the boy is Latin. When the story takes an unexpected turn, and the orphan finds that he has been anointed pope, two pigeons fly into St Peter’s Basilica and, stationed on his shoulders, translate the litany for him. My daughter and I learn that in fairy tales birds can often be the ultimate treasure: the golden bird the youngest son seeks to make his fortune; the bird of truth who can tell the girl where her mother has been taken; the sun bird the serving maid spies in Kublai Khan’s garden, whose plumage dazzles, and whose song is marvellous and unfathomable. I like to watch my daughter’s furrowed face as she tries to imagine the unfathomable melody.

  Then again, the birds in fairy tales sometimes turn against the children. Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs get
eaten by greedy birds, leaving them lost and crying in the woods. In another story, ravens claw the high branches in a midnight forest, waiting for the heroine to trip and scratch her knee. Even at a wedding, the doves can draw blood. I skim over these sections of the stories.

  In Cinderella—after the stepsisters have been bandaged and carted away, after the blood has been mopped up—the birds sing marvellously to the bride and groom, then fly off to other adventures. The illustration in my daughter’s book shows the open-winged birds gliding over an etched background, a white void in a jet-black landscape. I skip past this picture, too, in the hope that the sobbing won’t start up again.

  My daughter’s question:

  Her red eyes look at me. She asks me to turn back the pages to the picture of the birds pecking in the ashes. I comply.

  ‘Charlotte liked to do tricks for us,’ my daughter says. ‘She always whistled when I’d say good night to her. Do you think she’ll whistle tonight?’

  We scrutinise the air, but all we see is the loneliness of the night and all we hear is our own breathing.

  The Second Story: New Caledonian Crows

  A colleague sends me a YouTube clip about crows in a Japanese city. It’s from a David Attenborough documentary, and Attenborough’s affable, pleasantly amazed narration wafts over the scratchy images. The birds steal walnuts—from where, Attenborough doesn’t say—and try to figure out a way of opening them. They soar sleekly above the busy streets and, ingeniously, drop the walnuts onto the asphalt. If the hard surface doesn’t break the shell, the crows have learned that the weight of passing cars will. ‘The problem now,’ Attenborough muses, ‘is collecting the bits without getting run over.’ A reverse shot of thundering buses; the majestic black bird suddenly shrunk in size, hopping nervously from foot to foot. To avoid the rush of traffic, the crows drop the walnuts at intersections. When the green man pops up and the traffic abates, the crow flies down and retrieves the exposed food, poking at the broken shell before flitting away when the motorbikes and cars rev.